How to Market to Cold Traffic vs. Warm Traffic

Traffic is traffic, right? Nope.

The unfortunate truth is, not all traffic is created equal. Some of you may already be aware of that but are you aware of the implications? Let’s break it down a bit.

At the most basic level there are two types of traffic: cold traffic and warm traffic. Each type represents a different part of the sales funnel. At the top of the sales funnel you have cold traffic and at the middle and bottom is warm traffic. The type of traffic depends on the relationship that a website visitor has with your brand.

Let’s start with cold traffic...

What is Cold Traffic?

Cold traffic consists of people with no relationship to your brand whatsoever. The biggest marketing implication here is what I call the PSF; the Problem Solution Factor. This is our way of judging how aware your target audience is of the problem you solve, and the potential for solutions.

Before you go through this, make sure you have completed your avatar and done the persona exercise found here. This will help you establish your ideal target customer.

The first thing you need to ask yourself when you are going through the PSF is “how problem aware is my avatar?”; answering this question will change your marketing all together! Next we need to look at how aware they are of the solution. Take a plumber for instance, their avatar is both very problem and solution aware.

Bonus tip: if your avatar is super aware of both the problem and the solution, it is going to be super competitive.

Talking to a Cold Audience

So how do we communicate with our cold audience? We have determined how problem and solution aware they are and that they have no relationship with our brand, what now?

We need to take them through a very specific process of understanding their problem and moving towards the solution. Talk about the problem. It is all about empathy at this stage. I love empathy, I wrote a book about it!

Once the problem is discussed, we can slowly move our avatars into the desire phase where they start to think about benefits but aren’t quite there yet with the product. We need to get a real sense for the fact that there could be a solution. As people are going through this sales pitch, we are building "like, know and trust." This is what the desire phase is all about! You introduce the problem, you agitate the problem and you start creating a desire.

Imagine two cliffs facing each other; your ideal customer is on one and there is a giant chasm in the middle. They are in their current situation and across the chasm is their desired situation. Your goal is to get them to cross that chasm! You want them to take that leap to become the desired version of themselves. Buying our product or service is right there in the middle of everything. The mechanism to make that leap is “NEW, INTERESTING, NOVEL, UNIQUE; you have never been able to cross that chasm with such ease!” This how you speak to cold traffic!

Don't Forget Warm Traffic & Hot Traffic

Warm traffic and hot traffic don’t take as much time to discuss because they are already down the funnel and you can start to speak to them in different, more direct ways. You really just need to slam the trust features and benefits to them. The best way to do this is social proof with tons of testimonials. They need to just be closed!

At the end of the day you need to move people through conversion, where they start in the funnel determines how far you will bring them through the journey.

It is the golden rule of marketing: meet people where they are!

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